Tag: Home

I’ve a few months worth of distance from my trip now, which wipes away some of the gloss and the fog and adds a nice layer of perspective; still wouldn’t trade it all for anything. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in New York, but damn if I don’t want to get my work there in the near future.

The rest of the trip after the Day One recovery was split between museums, galleries, endless walking around Brooklyn and Downtown, more than a few instances of nearly getting lost, a passerby politely offering to sell me coke in the Village after a night of live jazz (and holy fuck the jazz!), conversations with total strangers in a cinema bar, and Hamilton.

There’s still nothing I can really say about Hamilton. They have all the words on that stage. I have none. I didn’t mob the theatre doors after the show angling for an autograph, but I did manage to snag an extra copy of the program, which I mailed to my grandfather, who’d always wanted a bonafide piece of New York city. Well, now you do.

After making the trek back, I stumbled right into the final rehearsals for my own show. Smaller black-box theatre, small cast, beautiful folks. Our run came and went and it felt good to be back in the thick of things. Cut to several months later and the summer is riding high, new projects are cooking along on all burners and I’m about ready to shuffle off from the city again for awhile. Instead of heading back to the grimy glorious heart of America, however, I’m aiming straight for the middle of nowhere, where I’ll have the time and the opportunity to stare out across an empty expanse of stick-thin trees and open gravel roads without hearing a single damn siren unless someone’s fireworks show gets really out of hand.

Because I’m simply no good at starting these things, I’ll just start at the now and go backwards.

Like a stylish thriller.

Except it’s not.

Home is the ground level of a Vancouver special with strange rattles in the ventilation, oddly-colored walls, a fireplace that doesn’t work but affords a mantle that doubles as a stand-in bookshelf, a hot water tank two sizes too small. Judging solely from the dialogue that seeps in through the walls, you would assume we lived next door to a Chekov play. The house is on a hilly East Van side street close to a skytrain, a Superstore and swathes of trees that I’m sure will be prettier to look at once the fog and the rain and the general greyness passes through and the city is granted it’s Two Months of Paradise. It’s underheated and overpriced but the location, central to all prominent friends and loved ones in the general vicinity, makes it priceless.

Before that, home was a shutaway apartment in Coquitlam, a fortress of solitude only occasionally invaded by welcome friends who brave the highways or train lines to reach us, a high-class looking kind of place only afforded thanks to a friend of a family who felt inclined to support a young upstart by cutting the rent and not asking A) Many questions and B) for a security deposit. Despite the protestations of friends and roommates, the Fortress of Solitude worked quite well as a safe haven of silence and peace until it was undermined by a plague of motherfucking bedbugs.

Home was a four studios and a mainstage in Central Alberta, a Pride Rock for a pack of theatrical lions whose roars drowned out everyone else at Kareoke nights at the campus pub. For twenty-four months, that pack was as thick as thieves and close as cousins, treading the well-worn boards, speaking in Shakespeare and Mamet and Tennessee Williams and sharpening our fangs for the waiting world we sized up as if they wouldn’t kick back. It was, as the speaker at the convocation would later say, “A womb with a view.”

Home was a suburban monolith surrounded by other suburban monoliths, an Edmonton satellite spinning lazily about ringed by growing refineries and shrinking farmers fields, with a father whose furrowed brow could summon a encyclopaedia of Prairie wisdom, a mother who could decipher the indecipherable for the blind, and a sister who shredded cars before she found a bird in her throat and started singing, and I mean really singing. The streets, the trees, the flowerbeds, the families all perfect, perfectly arranged.

Even the grow op down the street had a well-tended topiary.

Home was a ramshackle country house near the Saskatchewan border, surrounded by endless oceans of grain and canola sliced throughout with dirt roads. It was a patchwork of skinned knees and woodpiles, shooting practices and cattle barraging unintentionally through our backyard. It was an old Mitsubishi, it’s white rusting away week by week, a model that still worms it’s way through my subconscious and into the latest draft of whatever screenplay I’m writing. It usually doesn’t survive the first or second round of edits, but it’s there. Same with the suburban sprawl, the theatrical lions, and bits and pieces from every other split-level, rented room, dorm complex and basement suite I’ve holed up in to stay and scribble awhile.

I’m putting together a home, better than any of those bozos on the Home and Garden channel, a piece at a time.